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Forgotten wrecks are a time bomb | DW Documentary

DW Documentary
Documentaries
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this documentary1 month2020–2021 score 1.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended as a fascinating watch in threads on leaking wrecks and oil spills.

DW Documentary on the roughly 6,300 ships sunk in World War II that are now rusting and leaking oil into the seas. Scientists investigate contamination and the risk of a huge oil spill.

“The DW documentary on the matter. A fascinating watch.” (HN, 2020)

1 strong recommendations · 2 citations · Documentaries · partly dated

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@mchem Sep 2020 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Russia’s ‘slow-motion Chernobyl’ at sea
[this video] - The DW documentary on the matter. A fascinating watch. It is a shame that the economics do not play out in such a way that recovery and resale is feasible. Sadly, I do not expect most governments to be as proactive as Norway’s on the matter. The documentary suggests that even covering a wreck with sand as a preventative measure costs 10s of millions of €s. Surely an opportunity for a lower cost solution exists here?
Documentary on oil leaking from wrecks

Citations, criticism and jokes

@kd913 Oct 2020 Cites it
on HN thread An oil tanker with 60M gallons of oil aboard is currently sinking [video]
I was watching a video about how there are thousands of ships (6300) sunk from the past which did not have oil leached from their tanks. These have been converted to basically ticking time bombs as the metal and fuel tanks corrode. The amount of oil in these sunk ships is difficult to estimate, but even on a light estimate resulted in a wide-spread ecological disaster. As usual the response from 95% of governments out there is simply to bury their heads to the problem. Source from DW Documentaries ( [this video] )
Source for thousands of sunken ships as ticking time bombs
@emn13 Aug 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Plants, heavy metals, and the lingering scars of World War I
Fortunately, it's pretty likely that many of those toxins won't be particularly harmful in low doses; but the stress isn't good, that's for sure. A similar (worldwide) problem are all the maritime shipwrecks stemming from that period: [link] [link] [this video]
Related to worldwide problem of wartime shipwrecks

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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